I just love the banter guys. It really perks me up in the
morning. :->
Pardon my ignorance to the process, but perhaps a field support person out there who's had some experience in programming and labelling copious quantities of memory cards can help me to understand the process of running multiple AccuVotes for this purpose. I'd like to know more.I'm not a field support person but I was in Anoka a few times a while back to see their setup for programming 100 memory cards with VTS. One person set up the download console and then ran 3 Accu-Vote's doing the download with a second person occasionally helping (Diane often has to take phone calls). With a single machine, a person would be waiting for the download communications and the label printing but with 3 machines, that person would keep busy feeding memory cards and taping on labels. I would expect it to be much the same with the AVTS and floppies except that the time to download is trivial over Ethernet but it takes significant time (about a minute???) to write a floppy disk. Thus with a single machine a person would mostly be waiting for the floppy to write and the label to print. May as well keep the person busy with several machines downloading in parallel rather than waiting for the one floppy drive on the GEMS host. Again with GEMS, you set up the download queue and then just keep the download machines busy so you don't need an operator on the host. Now back to the regular discussion. Guy |